Educational certifications in the era of LLMs are going to be increasingly meaningless without proof-of-work, and that's going to mean in-class work without access to computational aids, if you really want to evaluate a person's skill level. This of course is the coding interview rationalization - CS students have been gaming auto-graded courses created by CS professors for some decades, and now that's easier than ever.
Just ask?
Some online degrees state that they're equivalent, but interviewers may still have their own opinions. I would discourage anyone from failing to mention the online nature of a degree in their CV. You're really not doing yourself a favor. A rigorous online degree is something to be proud of. I see people with PhD's proudly announcing their online course certificates on LinkedIn. However, 'discovering' that an education was of a different nature than one had assumed based on the presented materials may raise questions.
Here is a tip: maybe don't assume so much!
That says nothing other than that the interviewers have a narrow mind and/or are ignorant. OMSCS is a very well known program, and it's their problem if they don't know it.
The DB course particularly sticks out. My undergrad's DB course was fathoms harder than this. This is what you'd expect a highschooler should be able to learn through a tutorial not a university course.
If it doesn't talk about systems calls like mmap, locking and the design of the buffer pool manager, it's not a university Database course it's a SQL and ER modelling tutorial.
The OMSCS program is well known and well respected in the tech industry. It's a masters degree from the currently 8th ranked computer science school in the U.S.
The university make no distinction between students who take the courses online, vs in person. I.e., the diploma's are identical.
The reviews are rather outdated..
FWIW I meant the diploma is identical, the actual experience will obviously vary. Some people will get better outcomes online, some will get better outcomes in person.
My specialisation was databases there.
...
Do not worry, I do not work with databases in professional life as my main aspect. But I was not given a comprehensive education, and not even once there was a focus on anything more in depth. I came out without even knowing how databases work inside.
Naturally, I know what I could do - read a good book or go through open source projects, like Sqlite. But that knowledge was not was my uni gave me...
I am jealous of American/Canadian unis in this aspect.
DSI (6422) is taught by Andy Pavlo’s first PhD student who help to create the CMU course and a rather famous DB person. It is the same contents as the on-campus course (and were actually working to deepen/increase the depth of coverage). It’s designed to bridge between DB Theory and reading Postgres or MySql source code when it comes to DB designs and trade-offs — and covers topics like r-tries which I don’t think is covered elsewhere + a series of 12 seminal DB papers. As in any other grad-level class, you get out as much as you put in — and it’s super rare to have access to a DB researcher like Joy or hear his takes on DB development as a student at scale.
If anything, the feedback we’ve gotten from both on campus undergrad and MS students is that the OMSCS lectures + improvements are making their session more rigorous.